Rebuilding trust in governance in Africa

Comparative data suggests that there is a severe problem of trust in Africa. Summarizing data from 30 Afrobarometer surveys, Amessou Adaba and Boio find that fewer than one-half of people surveyed say that their president can be trusted, while trust levels in police, courts, and parliaments are even lower.¹ Though some scholars would interpret this as a sociological fact about African society, I would argue that it actually represents the failure of national institutions to be legitimate or accountable.

The reason for this was brilliantly characterized by the sociologist Peter Ekeh in the 1970s, who argued that the key to the nature of the post-colonial African state was the existence of “Two Publics.” Ekeh argued that in Western countries, “what is considered morally wrong in the private realm is also considered morally wrong in the public realm.”² In post-colonial Africa, however, “there are two public realms … with different types of moral linkages to the private realm.” Ekeh went on to identify these two publics. The first corresponded to traditional small-scale African society, what he called the “primordial public.” “The primordial public is moral and operates on the same moral imperatives as the private realm.”³ However, such primordial publics were merged together by colonial powers into colonies where “there is a public realm which is historically associated with the colonial administration and which has become identified with popular politics in post-colonial Africa … I shall call this the civic public.” Critically, “[t]he civic public in Africa is amoral and lacks the generalized moral imperatives operative in the private realm and in the primordial public.”⁴

It is the amorality of the civic public that creates the problem of trust. Ekeh’s view suggests that the key political problem for post-colonial Africa is how to develop a political project or a set of institutions which can merge the primordial with the civic public. This is what the success stories in Africa have done, for example, what Seretse Khama and the elites of the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) accomplished in the 1960s. In 1967, the anthropologist Adam Kuper was conducting fieldwork in western Botswana in the village of Kuli amongst the Ngologa people. On the third of February, less than six months after Botswana’s independence, Vice President Quett Masire, the second most powerful figure in the ruling BDP, attended the Kuli “kgota,” the traditional assembly. Kuper recorded in his fieldnotes:

“The Vice President addressed the kgota, urging progressive farming and other desiderata; he then fielded a number of questions from citizens, covering a number of Government policies, and in particular the new, higher school-fees.”⁵

By raising civic issues in a traditional setting, Masire was bridging the gap between the two publics. Something of the sort has been attempted in Somaliland since the 1990s.⁶ In a sense, it is also what has happened in Rwanda over the past 30 years, where the government uses “home grown initiatives” to implement policy.⁷ These initiatives tap into traditional structures and norms of society.

Apart from these relative successes, there have also been many failures. For example, Julius Nyerere’s agenda for African socialism and “Ujamaa” (meaning “familyhood” in Swahili) was inspired by the idea that this was an axis which could tap into the “communalistic,” traditional notions of African society and provide a bridge between the publics.⁸ However, the political problem turned out to be too big for this to work in Tanzania.

How then can this problem, which still creates distrust today, be effectively addressed? The success stories chart the way. All of them have bridged the two publics by leveraging historic notions of legitimate authority and using these to forge a new social contract. There are no simple recipes here, but what is desperately needed are ideas and discussion about what might work. Outsiders can help in this process because there is a wealth of information elsewhere in the world about what might work. However, as Liberian intellectual Edward Blyden put it almost 120 years ago:

“If, therefore, Europe wishes to help Africa—and in her own interests she must wish to help Africa—she can do so effectively … only by assisting her in the maintenance and development of her own social system.”⁹